Roadmap Overview (2015
What is product at Wikia? *Who is the product team? **The product manager is an expert on the market (our users) and product. This person defines the product. **The product designer designs the experience (the interaction and how it looks). Design lead also works with the product manager and engineer on product discovery and definition. **Engineers develop the product. Engineering lead works with the product manager and design lead early and participate in discovery and definition. **Quality assurance tests the product and makes sure it looks and works like it’s supposed to. **The community manager represents the community needs, supports rollout, and gathers feedback. **The project manager facilitates, clears obstacles, and keeps the process moving. *What do the teams at Wikia work on? **Community Management: admin tools, permissions, groups, moderation **Social: discussions, profiles, account creation, content sharing, messaging **Platform and Ops: issues of scale (millions of pages of content delivered to people in 200+ different countries plus need to make sure it’s localized to the right countries), site performance, international needs **Mobile: works predominantly on apps. Mobile web should be every team’s responsibility. **Revenue generation: advertising and partnerships **Core product and content: Wiki creation and shaping, content creation, editing, and formatting Community Management *The community team and product managers try to address the biggest needs in this area. *A lot of work is done responsive by nature but there is a forward looking roadmap *examples **Groups and permissions are not complete - wild project **tools for vstf and staff to revert bad edits **moderation tools to deal with bad edits and users **legality of content that we host - the DMCA process adherence/take down requests Social features *this is an area Wikia did not prioritize for a few years, but we are working on ‘straightening up’ **Sign up and login flow has been improved **Email systems have been rebuilt **We are looking at user profiles next *The new discussion experience **We do not intend to be a social network but a place for people who have shared interests to connect **We are working on a way to facilitate more active and engaging discussions for everyone, both contributors working together and casual fans who want to connect with other fans Platform *A lot goes into running a platform that delivers nearly 40 millions of pages of customized content across nearly 340k different communities to 140 million unique visitors (per month) from over 240 different countries *Site has to load quickly **Respond to 3k http requests per second **Cut page download times in half since the beginning of 2014 **Weathered 300+GB/sec sustained DDoS attacks Mobile *Community apps **Over 120 apps representing 540 different communities **Curation and customization capabilities for admins **The ability to quickly build new apps **New ‘mobile first’ and potentially app only features *Discussions **Main page curation *Data **Last 2 years, mobile apps usage has grown. It went from less than 100k to now 3m monthly users of apps Revenue generation *Keeps the site running and funds our evolution of the product and platform *Digital advertising is rapidly evolving market **Programmatic, performance standards, pricing **international considerations (different ads to run in China, Russia, USA, etc) **Mobile - close to half our traffic is consumed on a mobile device and we have to invest to stay ahead of the curve *Good ads are our goal! **We are working to have high quality, relevant ads and programs *Today, a significant percentage of Wikia’s traffic blocks ads **Ad blocking in certain areas of the world is over 50% and this continues to increase *Without ads **Wikia would not exist and neither would some of your favorite sites like Facebook, Netflix, etc. Core Product *In the process of making content more portable, we are building better contribution tools for users to complete the most common and important tasks **For example, portable infoboxes! We are making them easier to build and manage going forward while also making them portable. *Also working on tools to help admins and frequent contributors better assess and manage their content **Insights and flags **Curation tools *We are placing an emphasis on striking the best balance between the creativity and uniqueness of communities, the evolving ‘connected’ world, and reliability, security, and longevity of the platform. Category:2015 Session notes Category:Community Connect 2015